After Focusing on “Consistency,” Kite Hill Launches New Lines

Technology has begun to catch up to plant-based dairy. As alternatives to traditional yogurt, ice cream, and cheese have entered the market en masse, variety has been restricted by manufacturing advances. But plant-based category leader Kite Hill is betting that process improvements will allow it to fully realize the benefits of a slate of new products for 2021.

In January Kite Hill will debut new plant-based queso dip, spreadable cheeses and high protein yogurt. Other changes are being made to its Greek yogurt and traditional yogurt offerings. Debuting at Whole Foods Markets initially, the queso will have an MSRP of $4.99, Spreadable Cheese (available in cracked black pepper as well as garlic and herb) at $8.99, and Protein Yogurt at $1.99 for 5.3 oz. and $5.99 for 16 oz., respectively.

The new products join a robust portfolio of plant-based butters, Greek yogurt, yogurt tubes, ricotta cheese, filled pastas, cream cheese, dips, sour cream, and indulgent dessert-inspired yogurts that are sold in roughly 12,000 stores. It’s a broad product portfolio, but CEO Rob Leibowitz said the company has the power and ability to stretch.

“When I first started [I had] broad aspirations for just a phenomenal business [that had] a broad set of shoulders that had the right to expand into multiple categories,” Leibowitz said. “[But] making great tasting plant-based foods is exponentially harder than making great tasting foods from dairy… I didn’t see that coming until I got here. And thank goodness we attracted the right talent who can get it done.”

The past three years have been spent focusing on talent and production, Leibowitz said. The brand has raised $75 million to date, investing more than $25 million of that money in facilities and processes, including acquiring its copacker in 2018. Though these efforts were “three times harder than expected,” Leibowitz said, they’ve paid off, giving the brand the ability to quickly jump on white space it finds in the marketplace. Queso and Spreadable Cheeses both are large opportunities, he said, without a clear leader emerging from the plant-based brand cohort yet.

Though the company already has four other yogurt products, Leibowitz emphasized that the new higher protein launch will add incremental sales. The company has also reformulated its original (formally known as European style) yogurt to be a blended, creamier yogurt and cut back its Greek yogurt line to just unsweetened vanilla and plain. The goal is to create clearly differentiated use cases for each style.

“Our yogurts are highly targeted,” Leibowitz said. “Our Original yogurt is really the everyday use case, and then Greek is it’s own need state for sports oriented folks who want high protein without flavors, and then Blissful is about indulgence with no crossover between those two.”

Yogurt line adjustments aren’t flashy, of course, but Leibowitz said the changes to the company’s “consumer focused innovation” strategy. Meanwhile, it has taken a while to develop batch consistency.

“I can say we were not always high quality and we were not always consistent every day in the beginning. But you just can’t do that at scale,” Leibowitz said. “You’ve got to deliver to consumers the same product every single day in terms of the overall quality and consistency. A brand is a promise of consistent delivery every time every day the same way.”

Moving forward, aside from a possible launch of a yogurt package with toppings on the side, the company plans to focus largely on distribution, velocities and repeat consumer purchases for 2021.

Despite the fact that competition is rising in dairy alternatives, Kite Hill will remain focused on giving consumers what they want, which Leibowitz says is simply as close to “a dairy-like taste, texture and color” as possible.

“Sometimes I wonder about other companies using the novelty effect… just selling novelty doesn’t help the consumer,” he said. “Our goal is not to create a totally new eating experience for consumers with brand new tastes. Our goal is to give people a really true to dairy taste and texture and eating experience.”